Mailing List Maintenance 101: How to Conquer the Stale List

The digital age has only heightened the role of the mailing list—so don’t forget to clean it up, keep it current, and use it to its fullest capacity.

Your mailing list is an essential tool for your business: not only does it help you gather new leads, but it can keep clients engaged and provide metrics to track your marketing’s effectiveness.

An orderly mailing list is an effective mailing list. When you keep your contacts up to date, you will know that your analytics are trustworthy and your marketing is reaching an active and interested audience.

5 Ways to Keep Your Mailing List Updated

1. Remove Unresponsive Contacts

It doesn’t feel great removing contacts from your mailing list, but remember that maintaining interaction is much more important than having the longest possible list of email addresses. Sending a ton of emails doesn’t do your business any good if it’s all going unread or straight to the spam folder!

If you aren’t sure who you should be crossing off your mailing list, you can send out reconfirmation emails. Simply:

• Create a new master list without any contacts in it.
• Draft a customized email asking if the reader is still interested in your services and updates.
• Provide an “opt-in” link for your new master list and an “opt-out” link.
• After giving your contacts some time to sign on, delete the old list.
• Make sure to update all of your mailing list links (on social media, your website, and other marketing materials) to go to your new master list.

If a contact does not take action with the opt-in link to stay updated about your business, that’s a sign they should be removed from your mailing list—even if they didn’t click the “no” link.

2. Time-Stamp When Contacts Opt-In

It might seem like a little detail, but recording when contacts sing on to your mailing list is vital. By tracking opt-in dates, you can identify successful marketing strategies, sign-up trends and know when you need to reconfirm with contacts.

It’s a good idea to check in with unresponsive contacts for reconfirmation every 6 months. If someone stops using their email address, it might get flagged as “dormant” after 6-12 months. 

Sending to dormant addresses isn’t likely to get you blacklisted, but it can harm your sender reputation and increase the chance that your mail goes into a spam folder.

3. Communicate Calls to Action

Stay in touch! Not only should you be communicating regularly with your contacts, but you should also be giving them clear calls to action. 

Clear calls to read your blog, check out a sale, or look at a product, let you see which contacts are reading and interested in your emails. 

Without a call to action, you won’t know how many of your readers want to learn more about your business or purchase your products or services. Remember—potential clients like clear instructions about what they should do next.

4. Give Readers the Chance to Unsubscribe

Speaking of clear communication, you should always provide obvious opportunities to unsubscribe from your newsletter, even outside of your reconfirmation campaign.

Again, while it might feel good to see a ton of names on your mailing list, the ones you should care about are the consistent readers. By giving your contacts a clear “unsubscribe from this mailing list” button, your mailing list can practically stay up-to-date on its own!

5. Segment Your Mailing Lists

Your business has a lot to offer, but not every contact wants to hear about every offer. Today, most email platforms allow you to combine data analysis and mailing lists to send specific emails to one group of clients and not to another.

Sometimes contacts want to stay up to date with specific topics—sales, blog posts, giveaways, you name it! But you don’t want to overwhelm them with a whole ton of emails that aren’t related to their interests. 

When you segment your mailing lists, you can sort contacts into groups based on their responses and interests to keep them engaged and avoid flooding them with content that will go unread.

Maintain Your Progress

Regularly updating your mailing list saves you time and energy while boosting your revenue by cultivating leads who care about your business and services.